I am Briana Cavanaugh, Financial Bliss Mentor Coach and Accountant. I have been doing accounting since 2003 and more than 20 years of experience in various forms of coaching and counseling.

I focus on working with women, especially women with that unicorn business idea – you know the one that will change the world if only she got her financial crap together! I also work with individuals, couples, and business owners as well as executive teams. I design and teach workshops and trainings on financial self-love and pleasure in addition to have a bookkeeping firm.

I love helping women really get money and finance and feel powerful about their money! I support people who are doing amazing things in the world – coaches, leadership consultants, documentary production companies, LGBT community, marketing and PR consultants, permaculturists, authors, artists, activists, and other extraordinary business owners! I focus on people who are purpose driven and want more: more passion, more pleasure and more reach for their business. And the thing that stand in their way is so often money.

I help people understand money, what it is and what it isn’t and how they can use it to enhance their lives rather than be a slave to money. I used to say, money doesn’t buy happiness, but poverty (or scarcity thinking) has a way of keeping it away. And then I found that you can buy happiness. Sort of.

My work comes out of my own history with money and background in technology and finance. I spent years working in technology only to find myself disconnected from meaning and wondering why anyone would want to sit alone in a box all day. So I set off in search of my true purpose.

In the process I spent down my savings, my 401k, my unemployment and somehow landed myself on welfare. It was awful. I was desperately unhappy, working so so so hard, applying for literally thousands of jobs and getting nowhere. I did everything I was told and I just wasn’t a fit for the corporate world. I kept wondering what was wrong with me!

I am a very educated, hard working woman and I just couldn’t figure out how I landed on welfare! One morning I woke up and I didn’t have enough food to feed myself and my son and had to go to a food bank. I’m super lucky that was even a possibility for us. But I vowed never again. I vowed to figure out a way that I – and people like me – could make the money I need, so that I could get really good at money.

So I went to work learning about money.

I did tons of research about how to get support getting off of welfare (there’s is almost none). At the time there were 2 organizations in all of California. So I contacted one of them and they hired me. I did legislative work with the California state budget. I did advocacy around helping welfare moms get what they needed and learned how to get what I needed.

Because PG & E doesn’t take chickens or good feelings!

I realized that while having a purpose is great, somehow I’d have to draw down the resources to do things like pay rent and electricity because PG&E doesn’t take chickens, or love and good feelings as payment. Many people I met wanted to trade, barter, share, or dog walk instead of dealing with money.

They want the system to be different. I want the system to be different.

But wanting a thing does not make it so. In fact wanting a thing creates more wanting rather than creating the thing itself – it’s not looking at what’s real. The current world uses money to exchange goods and services. I wanted to be proficient in that system so that I could do things like have electricity and eat food every day. My son can’t eat massage and dog walking!

That lead to me taking on more work and eventually I got a part time gig doing bookkeeping alongside all the other work. People started to ask me for help with money because i figured so much of it out. I managed to feed myself and my, then small, son. I managed to create a company while homeschooling him and still studying and learning. It was a huge shift in how I thought about money, family, myself and my community.

Beyond that I realized that many women and marginalized people don’t have the self-confidence or protected space to really get the financial education and make decisions that lead to excellent money making and managing. And most money making seminars are focused in a way that is inaccessible to all but a few either because of the jargon or a the super high cost.

Fortunately, at about that same time, I was thrown into a job doing financial analysis for a non-profit based on my technology skills. “You can do it!” they said. And they were right. That was 2003.

I love my work! I hope you love your work too. If you find that you want to love your work more and worry about money less, give me a call or drop me an email. I’d love to hear from you!